English

Multilingual Text-to-SQL: Benchmarking the Limits of Language Models with Collaborative Language Agents

Computation and Language 2025-09-30 v1 Artificial Intelligence Databases Emerging Technologies Information Retrieval

Abstract

Text-to-SQL enables natural access to databases, yet most benchmarks are English-only, limiting multilingual progress. We introduce MultiSpider 2.0, extending Spider 2.0 to eight languages (English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese). It preserves Spider 2.0's structural difficulty while adding linguistic and dialectal variability, demanding deeper reasoning for complex SQL. On this benchmark, state-of-the-art LLMs (such as DeepSeek-R1 and OpenAI o1) reach only 4\% execution accuracy when relying on intrinsic reasoning, versus 60\% on MultiSpider 1.0. Therefore, we provide a collaboration-driven language agents baseline that iteratively refines queries, improving accuracy to 15\%. These results reveal a substantial multilingual gap and motivate methods that are robust across languages and ready for real-world enterprise deployment. Our benchmark is available at https://github.com/phkhanhtrinh23/Multilingual_Text_to_SQL.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.24405,
  title  = {Multilingual Text-to-SQL: Benchmarking the Limits of Language Models with Collaborative Language Agents},
  author = {Khanh Trinh Pham and Thu Huong Nguyen and Jun Jo and Quoc Viet Hung Nguyen and Thanh Tam Nguyen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.24405},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T06:03:47.466Z